Sunday, December 9, 2012

I decided to create some review math centers. The last week before the holidays can make kids and teachers pretty antsy. I never like going into "filler" mode so I wanted to create something that would be fun, festive, but also give me an idea of which skills my students are still falling behind on. Lo and behold, I created 12 Days of Christmas Math Centers. My colleague, Mike, made an ADORABLE set of 12 Days of Christmas Clipart. What can I say? It inspired me! I created 6 different center activities to assess where my students are at and which skills I will need to revisit:#1 - 5.OA.2 Write simple expressions that record calculations with numbers, and
interpret numerical expressions without evaluating them.

#2 - 5.NBT.4 Use place value understanding to round decimals to any place.

#3 - Add decimals - Students use the prices from the page above along with the pictures below. They must add the cost of each of the items in the picture together.

#4 - Subtracting decimals - they subtract the given costs of the two items from each other from the price chart above.

Since there are several activities, I will do a few things. I plan on having them work on this over several days. I will also have some students do fewer activities than others. I'm also going to place the activities all around the room and have different groups working on different tasks. I can't wait to see how they enjoy this activity and, more importantly, find out what I'm going to need to re-teach after the holidays.

Tuesday, December 4, 2012

I'm so excited to put out a freebie that I'm really proud of. I love practicing decimal multiplication with my kids because it's such an important skill that they will be using for the rest of their lives. The activity that I came up with follows a story of a family who is going out to get a tree and decorations for the holidays. It's called Trimming the Tree. Given pictures and prices, students must calculate the cost of the items the family plans to purchase. Check it out:

The second part of the activity challenges students to calculate discounts after being provided with a list of coupons that the family has. They will need to find the new price of the items that have a coupon.

Once the discounted prices are found, students will then re-total the decorations to find the price after the discount. Finally (what we alllllll love when shopping), they will have to calculate sales tax onto the discounted total in order to find the final total of the purchases.

I hope you're able to use this activity with your students and I'd love to hear any comments/feedback you have afterward. Happy Holidays!!Terry